Song of Susannah - Stephen King [127]
“Jesus,” Eddie said.
“It’s faint, I tell you.”
“But there.”
Roland opened his door. “We can do nothing about it. Ka marks the time of each man and woman. Let’s move, Eddie.”
But now that they were actually ready to get rolling again, Eddie was queerly reluctant to go. He had a sense of things unfinished with sai King. And he hated the thought of that black aura.
“What about Turtleback Lane, and the walk-ins? I meant to ask him—”
“We can find it.”
“Are you sure? Because I think we need to go there.”
“I think so, too. Come on. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
* * *
Thirteen
The taillights of the old Ford had hardly cleared the end of the driveway before Stephen King opened his eyes. The first thing he did was look at the clock. Almost four. He should have been rolling after Joe ten minutes ago, but the nap he’d taken had done him good. He felt wonderful. Refreshed. Cleaned out in some weird way. He thought, If every nap could do that, taking them would be a national law.
Maybe so, but Betty Jones was going to be seriously worried if she didn’t see the Cherokee turning into her yard by four-thirty. King reached for the phone to call her, but his eyes fell to the pad on the desk below it, instead. The sheets were headedCALLING ALL BLOWHARDS. A little something from one of his sisters-in-law.
Face going blank again, King reached for the pad and the pen beside it. He bent and wrote:
Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.
He paused, looking fixedly at this, then wrote:
Dad-a-chud, dad-a-ched, see it, Jake! The key is red!
He paused again, then wrote:
Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, give this boy a plastic key.
He looked at what he had written with deep affection. Almost love. God almighty, but he felt fine! These lines meant nothing at all, and yet writing them afforded a satisfaction so deep it was almost ecstasy.
King tore off the sheet.
Balled it up.
Ate it.
It stuck for a moment in his throat and then—ulp!—down it went. Good deal! He snatched the
(ad-a-chee)
key to the Jeep off the wooden key-board (which was itself shaped like a key) and hurried outside. He’d get Joe, they’d come back here and pack, they’d grab supper at Mickey Kee’s in South Paris. Correction, Mickey-Dee’s. He felt he could eat a couple of Quarter Pounders all by himself. Fries, too. Damn, but he felt good!
When he reached Kansas Road and turned toward town, he flipped on the radio and got the McCoys, singing “Hang On, Sloopy”—always excellent. His mind drifted, as it so often did while listening to the radio, and he found himself thinking of the characters from that old story, The Dark Tower. Not that there were many left; as he recalled, he’d killed most of them off, even the kid. Didn’t know what else to do with him, probably. That was usually why you got rid of characters, because you didn’t know what else to do with them. What had his name been, Jack? No, that was the haunted Dad in The Shining. The Dark Tower kid had been Jake. Excellent choice of name for a story with a Western motif, something right out of Wayne D. Overholser or Ray Hogan. Was it possible Jake could come back into that story, maybe as a ghost? Of course he could. The nice thing about tales of the supernatural, King reflected, was that nobody had to really die. They could always come back, like that guy Barnabas on Dark Shadows. Barnabas Collins had been a vampire.
“Maybe the kid comes back as a vampire,” King said, and laughed. “Watch out, Roland, dinner is served and dinner be you!” But that didn’t feel right. What, then? Nothing came, but that was all right. In time, something might. Probably when he least expected it; while feeding the cat or changing the baby or just walking dully along, as Auden said in that poem about suffering.
No suffering today. Today he felt great.
Yar, just call me Tony the Tiger.
On the radio, the McCoys gave way to Troy Shondell, singing “This Time.”
That Dark Tower thing had been sort of interesting, actually. King thought, Maybe when we get back